Christopher Nolan’s movies have a history of garnering positive reviews, doing very well at the box office, and being kind of difficult to discuss. Putting aside his “Dark Knight” trilogy, which was quite simply mysterious good guy versus various really bad guys, he made “Memento” ... and told everything backward! He made “Inception,” which took place, for lack of a better term, inside out. And his “Interstellar” told its complicated story while defying any logical form of storytelling. Those are not complaints; they’re expressions of awe.

But with “Dunkirk,” Nolan presents the true World War II tale of an enormous amount of British and French soldiers who were trapped on a beach, hoping for rescue, while being bombarded by German forces. He pulls it off with comparative simplicity, holding back on the visual effects and concentrating on the human drama. Nolan, 46, spoke about the film last week in Santa Monica.

Q. How do you go about choosing projects?

A. It’s always been about finding a story that hooks me, that I feel that I can have an emotional connection with, that’ll sustain me through the years of making the film. I’m very single-minded; I only do one thing at a time. I’m never very good at planning what I’m going to do next. So, usually, I dive in and concentrate on one film for two or three years.

Q. What attracted you to telling the story of Dunkirk?

A. Like most British people, Dunkirk’s a story I’ve grown up with. As kids, we received this sort of mythical, almost fairy tale version of what happened there. But over time, I developed a respect and fascination for the people who’d taken part in the evacuation. I’ve never understood why a modern film hasn’t been made about it, and as a filmmaker, those are the kind of gaps that you’re looking to fill.

Q. The structure of the film is impressive, in that you’re telling three stories – one on land, one at sea, and one in the air – that all converge into focusing on a single event. What inspired that?

A. I was hoping to gain was a way of maintaining a subjective storytelling approach, while still building up a coherent picture of the larger events at Dunkirk. So, everything in the film is intended to be intense, suspenseful and subjective. You want to be on the beach with these guys seeing events from their point of view. But then you also want to build up this bigger picture. That requires a view from the air, from a Spitfire pilot, and on the sea, from people coming over to help with the evacuation. I didn’t want the audience to step out of the movie, to step out of the human-scale perspective. I didn’t want to cut to generals in rooms with maps, pushing things around. I didn’t want to give the audience knowledge that the characters didn’t have other than through the interaction of these three distinct story threads.

Q. The film, especially in the dogfight scenes between Spitfires and Messerschmitts, has an unmistakable feeling of reality. Were you going crazy with effects, or was it actually real?

A. In planning the aerial sequences, it was important to me that we try to achieve as much in-camera (as opposed to visual effects) as possible. We were able to get real Spitfires, a real bomber, real Henkels, and we tried to get the IMAX camera in places we’d never got it before. We wanted to put the audience in the cockpit of the plane, with the pilot. We had a Yak airplane that’s similar to a Spitfire, but has two cockpits, so we could have a real pilot flying it, and we had our actor in the air, with a camera mounted on the wing, getting closeups of him.

Q. Did you watch any specific films or show any films to your actors and crew before starting this, as a way to influence them?

A. I like to cast a pretty wide net in terms of films to show the crew before we start. We looked at David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” for the treatment of landscape on the beaches. We also looked at a lot of suspense films. We looked at some Hitchcock, but the film I pointed at most was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear,” which I think has a very distinct influence on various aspects of “Dunkirk.” That was the one we most honed in on as far as that language of suspense.